Not Dry: i - Los Dos Hombres
February, 2021
After setting up a short video camera tripod with a long cylinder fixed to the base the how many, the six members of the investigation team, they walk away from the cylinder as it emits a faint glow, a soft powder luminescence, flickering against the red stone pavers, the orange soft drink sunset, bubbles against the skyline, the bridge, the river and the marshland, the airport behind (how much is not enough when talking about nihilism), fizzing not so much with carbonation but, but with loading signal whir noise spin sputter, like the sound of fine silver gears spinning within the media of little angel wings hovering behind your head, your ears, loitering against the ratio, nearly there, extending, loading (if less is more than imagine how much more is).
Without the sort of time or focus required to categorically describe each of the six members of the investigation team it might be rather easier to parse between them the following characteristics: five of the six are wearing headgear of which three could be described as helmets, one as a fishing hat with a halo above and one is a modern looking jingasa with perhaps radio equipment sewn in; clothing across the team varies wildly although a colour consistency of navy and tan stay across the shawls, the armor, the trench coats, whatever else covers them; two are children, one is a girl in her twenties with a dingo tail and pierced dingo ears with gold loops through the holes, is that too much detail, it draws the eye. I say to Les, did I ever read you the short story by Schopenhauer about the kids who receive a copy of Aesop’s fables from their mum and the kids throw it back at her and say, what, you want us to believe these stories of talking animals. Grow up.
We turn to see a local lady, local to Les not to me, I am not from around here, thirties, five foot what, lime salted bob cut blonde, grey overalls, pull up against the jetty in her trawler, the capital c Collector they call her, they Les, they the local restaurant owners and who else. Always the same time of late afternoon, on a loop, with boxes full of disjecta found in the sea, mostly the bones of birds and animals that look like birds. She takes them up to her studio on the hill, we will see its lights turn on shortly through broad ocean facing windows after she carries her boxes to her salt rusted pickup and careens up the road where she will unpack and create a fossilised shadow theatre against the ceiling and the walls.
Les says how appropriate for our dining this evening. You mean sea bird on the menu, no he means the Mexican restaurant, Los Dos Hombres with its Day of the Dead colour palette and decor, Under the Volcano but Les they don’t serve alcohol here. He says that he drinks heavily these days and I say yes of course, I know, so do I. The six investigators patrol the waterfront only some ten metres from our table, scanning the ground with instruments, searching. So why a dingo says Les a little too loudly and don’t say D O G as in Nietzsche’s ‘Death Of -’ and the waitress says what can I get for you, I order the steak, chorizo and potato in pasilla sauce, Les a massive enchilada. Why not a cat and don’t say C A T as in ‘Comedy And -’ Les gestures around him, or a B I R D and don’t say ‘Being Is Really -’ and he gestures again.
The channel of water rolls in horrendously obtuse angles, generating creaking timestretched drone reverberations like those from falling glaciers, as a megafauna goat with hooves the size of ambulances trots down the middle of the river, stepping over the bridge now as it sloshes water onto the motorway, cars honking and turning on their windscreen wipers in defense. Pouring our drinks, the waitress leans her broad olive face towards Les and says, do you know what we call a goat with no hind legs. Gracias. She walks away ringing a bell like laugh that turns into an echo of little chimes as she puts on a stain glass cathedral headpiece that covers her face down to below her chin. Beside the restaurant is a patch of synthetic grass that leads into a miniature golf arcade. The waitress stands on the grass with her back to the wall of the restaurant and, as a little white ball rolls between her legs, the cathedral lights up.
The thing is Les, you are a M A N you know all ‘Meaninglessness and -’ thirty seven years of Nihilism no need to remind me, but that woman, sure, sure, just add ‘Wondering Overrides’ and you have yourself a remedy. Wondering as a verb, as in I am just wondering through the city. My man you are all G O O D (see you in the ‘Garden Of Ontological Divisions’) but I have let our friendship linger. A recommended memory notifies me of when we were young men with friends walking beneath some dreampunk moon towards the waves, a wall of light some three kilometres up the dunes all smoke filtered streaming from a chemical plant right there on the beach, sharing the grains with us so to speak, bathing its cylinders in the salt water as - well I cannot remember whether we did the same or not.
Just like, Les says, how I cannot remember the reason for asking you down here, why you drove in the vein of the 1986 Sega arcade game Outrun, down a straight road, transitioning across ecosystems and time zones, reveling (he knows this) in a collage of colour and landscape and genre that saw me make this journey, only the second time in a decade, how sad is that. However unlike Outrun there was no girl beside me to synchronise witness to the diamond ocean and ember sunset decline, to the synthesizer melodies bouncing down octaves, not trying to outrun police or even time for that matter but the other thing. What the investigation team is looking for, what the Collector is not coming home with.
He says that he goes into space a lot these days, that he holds onto VHS tapes of Sol Bianca and tells everybody he is not really a tourist, that he is one of them, and I say of course, I know, so do I. The beach is the most moonlike area on earth, especially of a nighttime but even without the stars, it has that edge of consciousness feel to it. Step into the ocean and drift through space, push off from the moon dust that clings to your feet as you tumble away from the ground like a cannonball in love and then, hold on, into the black hole gob of a whale who wants to show you the future, but Les remember we do not listen to animals (see: Schopenhauer, see Space Whale Aesop).
The burrito is half gone, no completely gone, when Les says hey how have I finished already, did I even taste it, seriously where did it go. And then he says, come on why did I ask you down here, I honestly cannot remember. I suggest that he did not ask and he says come on man, you know what I mean, I was feeling down but now I feel something else. How do you feel. Well. I feel like filtered light. How do you feel. I feel like the reason there was no girl beside me on the drive down is she is feeding our children at home. I feel like, you know how you see images these days of things that perhaps a human should not have access to. Lady bugs covered in a field of tiny dew drops that magnify their form into cellular bloom. Towering walls of salt coloured all gold and purple dripping thick gravities. Nano medical miracles blown up on billboards. High resolution psychogeographic walking tours of quiet places nobody except the unconscious locals ever visit. Bison at thirty seven below zero.
I feel like, like how do you turn those image events, that seem beyond the frame of regular human observation, into metaphors that can meaningfully connect not just two disparate concepts but two people together. How when I used to play the electronic organ in nursing homes, show tunes of the twenties and thirties and forties, how everybody sang along. Les, imagine if we get to sit in a nursing home together one day, just what songs will our compatriots sing. Just think of the subgenres and niche fragmentations of culture and song we subscribe to. What will we sing together, other than Wonderwall.
Perhaps we will just listen to waves at the beach. Not at the beach, of course. And, of course, of course, I already know the answer full well but I do not say it aloud lest the illusion be shattered, for Les that is. But just between us it will be the same as Proust predicted when his narrator as a young man imagined what the theatre would be like, the spectators looking, quote, as through a stereoscope, at a scene that existed for himself alone, though similar to the thousand other scenes presented to the rest of the audience individually, end quote, translated. There is plein air painting happening beside the restaurant here, Les points at the painter, is he silhouetting us as we ask for the bill, is he swallowing the waitress in ink, no he is illustrating a QR code which, as darkness sets, is timeless black on black.
I want to show you something. Put this stain glass cathedral headpiece on to see, well, not necessarily through a glass, darkly, more so through one window for each eye, through an algorithmic sequence of vowel shaped filtered lights that make it all seem so bloody real Les, can you feel the meaningfulness, the real thing, this apartment in Hong Kong, the background music like the muzak we used to listen to years before, that soft nineties female whispered vocal sample percussive ride cymbal night loop that makes you feel like you were given a name by the warmth of the universe, no longer an orphan of the underworld. Look at what I am wearing on my head now, is it coming through clearly.
The apartment is stunning in a measure equal to most any fantasy of luxury emboldened by your standard teenage capitalist raised on the sort of love lessons gained on the bow of space opera observation decks, of two in the morning airport shopping districts as you wait to fly in the opposite direction of wherever. Broad ocean facing windows, whales in the distance sure, but what about the birds Les, who dreamt them up, was it you, was it the Collector, gulls flying through the open doors, to the inside and to the out, like one of those menageries built into grand manor homes where peacocks walk from the dining room through to the garden alcove to drink from the fountains. Lo the birds do not smell, they do not defecate or leave feathers behind, rather they are splinters of light, weightless, shards of betwixt magnesium correcting the environment yes as fine white cursors blinking across, deleting for mercy, the simulated skyline.
When the rain comes it brings with it a trolley problem. Do I let it rain on your headset and cause you to worry about the impact on the electronics (the shock of the real) or do I take the risk you will not notice and just allow the simulated wetness to embrace us (the virtual real). How would it be to just recline here as the water rises around us, the street lights warbling amniotic shine flutter through bleeding darkness, bubbles against the eye line, wow talk about real, Les. Perhaps we just need to get more sleep and drink more water, it could be that the antidote to philosophy is interoception. Say you were to take the lit cathedral away from your head and notice you were yet wearing another cathedral, that beyond this level of simulation you were being stimulated by ever more fiction - what then. Have I just given the punchline away. Is it ok to laugh now. The thing about nihilism is that it helps us to believe in everything (the cylinder is an embryo).